What exactly is Google AdWords and how can it help you?

Imagine you could advertise your business in a magazine and that you only actually paid a very small amount of money for that advert if someone actually read it. In essence, that is the concept of Pay-per-click.

Pay-per-click means that someone advertising will pay every time a visitor clicks on their advert and is then taken to the advertiser’s website.

You can use AdWords to bring targeted traffic to your web site by creating ads and choosing keywords related to your business. Advertisers do not pay to create their adverts (ads) with AdWords, it is totally free and as many ads can be created as required. AdWords will then place your ads on Google when people search for your specified keywords. AdWords is a pay-per-click system so the only time you pay is when AdWords brings targeted users to your web site. If your ad is displayed 10 times or 10.000 times…. you don’t pay anything. You only pay if someone clicks on your ad.

This is a very effective form of online marketing indeed. Millions of businesses around the world use AdWords.

So how do we actually use Google AdWords?

Let us suppose you run a business that sells ‘bananas’. You have a wonderful website that has all the info a banana fan could ever wish for. You don’t get many visits to your website, perhaps because it is not a very search engine friendly website – or perhaps you just have a lot of competitors selling bananas as well.

So you decide to try Google AdWords. The first thing you need to do is create an AdWords campaign. This is very much like creating an advertising campaign with a brochure or a flyer. Only in this case – your campaign will be online. You create your campaigns within the AdWords website and Google will assist you with each and every step.

Here is a dummy campaign example for your bananas.

You can create as many of these campaigns as you wish. If for example, you create three differently worded campaigns – Google will rotate them for you and after a few days you will be able to log in to your account and see which campaign performed best. Deleting campaigns or creating new ones is fast and easy.

Once you have created your AdWords campaign you can specify how much money you are willing to spend on advertising. This is what we call the ‘budget’ and for the sake of our bananas let us suppose we are willing to spend €5 per day.

Once we have set our budget, Google will display our ads for as long as we have not exhausted that €5. If we spend our full budget on a particular day, Google will suspend our campaign until the following day. This way we can always be sure that we are not overspending and don’t need to worry about turning our AdWords campaign off at any time.

So lets us assume we are willing to pay 25 cents each time someone clicks on our AdWords campaign and visits our site. That would mean our ads can be clicked on 20 times in one day before our budget limit is reached. 25 cents is actually what we are willing to pay-per-click. This payment is called a ‘bid’. Starting to make sense now?

But there is more!! Not only do we set a daily budget – we also choose how much money we are willing to spend each time someone clicks on our ad for specific keywords. It is these keywords that are responsible for our ads being shown in the first place.

So how do we actually use Google AdWords?

When we setup an AdWords campaign we don’t actually specify the bid for a campaign – we choose keywords and it is these individual keywords that we bid on. Follow our example…

Remember our dummy campaign:

Before we publish our campaign for the world to see – we choose keywords related to our bananas that we think people will search for when looking for our product.

Now we can set our bids for the individual keywords. Perhaps we are willing to pay 20 cents for the word ‘banana’ – as it is such a global term and not confined to a specific location. Perhaps we choose to pay 35 cents for the keyword ‘portugal bananas’ – because this phrase is much more relative to your business.

But there is a little more you need to know. The amount we pay per click – determines the position at which our ads are displayed in a Google search page.

Imagine you have a competing company down the street and they are also running an AdWords campaign to sell their bananas. If they are willing to pay 30 cents per click and you are paying 25 cents for a specific keyword – their ad would be at the top of the AdWords list and yours would appear below it. To display your ad above theirs – you would have to increase your bid to more than 30 cents.

You can at any time change your payment settings and increase or decrease the amount you are willing to pay per click – as well as your daily budget. Google AdWords is very comprehensive and very helpful when you set up your campaigns. Google will show you what the maximum bids are and also simulate the position your ads will appear at as well as how many clicks you can expect.

So we have now completed our campaign setup. If we pay money into our AdWords account and activate our campaign – each time someone searches in Google using one of the keywords we have specified, our ad will appear. And it will continue to appear as long as we have not reached our budget limit. If someone clicks on our ads we pay the amount of money we bid for the specific keyword used in the search. Simple, quite straightforward and very effective.

This has been a very basic introduction. Google AdWords can do so much more. You can choose where in the world you want your ads to appear in and you can create campaigns in different languages. You can specify where your ads will not appear. Google also has some very intuitive tools to help you create you campaigns. Probably one of the most helpful is the ‘Keyword Tool’, which will show you the most popular keywords used for your products or services and how often they were used in the last month.

So what is Google AdSense?

If you have a website and would like to earn some money from advertising on your site – you can use AdSense to display AdWords campaigns on your site. Each and every time someone clicks on an ad within your website, you get paid paid a percentage of the revenue.